Newt Gingrich is worried the Trump team will 'lose their nerve'

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published 1 January 2017

Trump ally Newt Gingrich said Sunday in an interview with ABC News that his greatest worry as the inauguration approaches is that President-elect Donald Trump and his team will "lose their nerve" once in office.

"Look, they're going to arrive in Washington, and for them to be successful they have to stake out positions that [Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Donna Brazile] will not like and the left will hate," he said. "I'm worried that when they realize how big the problem is, that they decide that they're just going to do the best they can and give in."

Gingrich specifically cited environmentalists in the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior as sources of negative pressure for the Trump administration. "My deepest concern is that they're going to arrive, you're going to have the greens going crazy," he said. "You're going to have the government employees going crazy about civil service reform. You're going to have the teachers union going crazy over school choice. And these are pretty nonnegotiable. I mean, if you're serious about school choice, there is no agreement with the teachers union."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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